Chapter 8: What We Carried Home
We took a cab back from O'Hare.
Luca had his hours between assignments, but neither of us suggested doing anything with them.
We got Leo a sandwich from a terminal deli, found a cab, and headed home.
Leo sat between us in the back seat and fell asleep before we reached the highway, his head against Luca's arm, the toy airplane still in his lap.
Luca and I didn't talk for a long time.
The city moved past the windows.
Gray sky, bare trees, the flat stretch of interstate.
"I need to know one thing," I said finally, quietly, so as not to wake Leo.
"Ask me."
"Was there ever anything else?
Anything you've been carrying that I don't know about?"
He turned to look at me.
His face was tired in a way that went past the flight, past the day.
"No.
There's nothing else." He held my gaze.
"I swear to you."
"I believe you," I said.
"But I need you to understand that the reason this hurt wasn't the accident.
You were cleared.
I understand protocol and I understand that things go wrong and that investigations exist for a reason." I kept my voice level.
"What hurt was that you looked at me every day for fourteen months and decided I didn't need to know.
That you made that choice for me."
"Yes," he said.
"I did.
And I was wrong."
"I need that to not happen again."
"It won't."
"I need you to mean that."
"I do mean it." He reached across Leo's sleeping head and put his hand over mine.
"I mean it, Sara."
It was the first time either of us had used names.
Something about it made it more real — more specific, more binding.
I turned my hand over and held his.
Leo slept between us, one hand curled around his toy airplane, completely unaware that the world had shifted slightly and then, slowly, shifted back.
We got home in the early afternoon.
Leo woke up when the cab stopped and walked inside half-asleep, dropped his bag at the door, and went directly to the couch, where he was unconscious again within minutes.
Luca and I stood in the kitchen.
"I'm going to call Curtis tomorrow," Luca said.
"Directly.
Not through a contact.
I'm going to call him and talk to him myself."
"Good."
"And I want to tell you everything.
About that night.
The whole thing, start to finish, the way I've never told anyone." He looked at me.
"If you want to hear it."
"I do," I said.
"But not tonight."
He nodded.
I put the kettle on.
Got two mugs down from the cabinet.
It was an ordinary thing — the most ordinary thing — and I did it without thinking, and then I stood there with both mugs in my hands and felt the full weight of the day settle through me.
Not anger.
Not relief.
Something quieter than either.
The particular exhaustion of a crisis that had not destroyed anything, but had changed the shape of things permanently.
"Luca," I said.
"Yeah."
"Leo's drawing.
Did you put it somewhere safe?"
He reached into his jacket pocket and held it up.
Still folded, slightly creased.
BEST PILOT EVER in huge crooked letters.
"I'm keeping it," he said.
"I'm going to put it up in the cockpit."
I set his mug on the counter in front of him.
"You should probably earn it back first," I said.
He looked at me.
Something in his expression — the guilt, the exhaustion, the love, all of it at once.
"Yeah," he said quietly.
"I probably should."
The kettle began to whistle.
Leo murmured something from the couch.
Outside, the afternoon light was thin and pale and entirely ordinary.
I poured the tea.
---
Some mistakes don't announce themselves — they wait quietly in a coat pocket for years, until the moment finally comes when they can't wait anymore.
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